My 2 cents....
Plato was 20 years ahead of its time.
I was one of the lucky ones that could take my bike or moped when I was
14-15 and ride for 10 minutes and could access a terminal and had unlimted
access time....I wrote a few games...I dont have anything from those days,
sadly...no tapes, no listings...
Almost every afternoon this guy in a GM plant in Oshawa Ontario Canada would
TEL-TALK (IIRC?) me and we would play dogfight for a hour or so....he was
writing automobile-building robot animations or something....slow...still
neet...
I miss those days...I wish I could see some screen shots again....
Later all...
Claude
http://computer_collector.tripod.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chandra Bajpai" <cbajpai(a)attbi.com>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2003 8:40 AM
Subject: Ebay - Neat PLATO system (AOL before AOL)
This is pretty neat.A Plato terminal. I never knew a
on-line community
existed before Lee Feldstein's Community Memory project.In hindsight it
looks like he was trying to copy Plato.
A Description:
Welcome to PLATO.
The PLATO system, started way back in 1960, was developed as a
technological solution to delivering individualized instruction, in
thousands of subjects from algebra to zoology, to students in schools
and universities across the nation. As the system grew and evolved, it
became, pretty much by accident, the first major online community, in
the current sense of the term. In the early 1970s, people lucky enough
to be exposed to the system discovered it offered a radically new way of
understanding what computers could be used for: computers weren't just
about number-crunching (and delivering individualized instruction), they
were about people connecting with people. For many PLATO people who came
across PLATO in the 1970s, this was a mind-blowing concept
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<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3404078052&category=
4193> &item=3404078052&category=4193